Consumer Behavior

Research on choice overload has demonstrated that choosing from larger, versus smaller, sets can reduce consumers’ wellbeing. However, in real life consumers seem able to cope with ever-expanding assortments better than what this research would predict. We argue that this discrepancy depends on differences in choice timeframes: Whereas participants in choice overload studies usually make a one-off choice within a limited amount of time, real consumers often spend longer time making certain choices and/or experience repeated exposures to the same choice over time.

In the customer expectations arena, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact on expectations of variation in cultural variables unique to a country. Here the authors focus on one country, India, and a major cultural influence there — the extent of belief in karma. Prior research in the United States suggests that disconfirmation sensitivity lowers expectations. Here the authors examine whether belief in karma and, consequently, having a long-term orientation, counteracts the tendency to lower expectations in two studies that measure and prime respondents' belief in karma.

On a visit to any major U.S. department store, consumers can observe vendor shops (typically for cosmetics, apparel, apparel accessories, electronics, and toys), each selling a particular brand exclusively and designed to reflect the image of that brand. For these vendor shops, also called boutiques or "stores within a store," retailers rent out retail space to the respective manufacturers and give them complete autonomy over retail-level decisions, such as pricing and in-store service.

In settings such as investing for retirement or choosing a drug plan, individuals typically face a large number of options. In this paper, we analyze how the size of the choice set influences which alternative is selected. We present both laboratory experiments and field data that suggest larger choice sets induce a stronger preference for simple, easy-to-understand options.

We present a broad-based, consumer-centric view of innovation — referred to as "perceived firm innovativeness" (PFI). PFI is conceptualized as the consumer's perception of an enduring firm capability that results in novel, creative, and impactful ideas and solutions. We develop and validate a PFI scale and show that PFI impacts consumer loyalty via two processing routes: a functional-cognitive route and an affective-experiential route.

Most studies of word-of-mouth (WOM) in marketing have concentrated either on aggregate outcomes (e.g., new product diffusion) or on the transmission process (i.e., "talking" or "sending" information). This paper instead focuses on the reception process at the individual level (i.e., "listening" to information), and addresses two questions: what makes people listen to WOM, and what are the drivers of the type and extent of WOM impact on recipients' brand attitudes and purchase intentions?

To optimally allocate its marketing mix across customers, a firm needs to consider the evolution of its customers over time. Changes in the marketing environment, as well as intrinsic changes in preferences or needs, may discretely shift customers into different buying-behavior states. The ability to identify the dynamics in customer behavior and its drivers presents an opportunity for the firm to influence the movement of customers to more favorable states of buying behavior.

We study the structure of optimal wedges and capital taxes in a dynamic Mirrlees economy with endogenous distribution of skills. Human capital is a private, stochastic state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we construct a tractable life-cycle model of human capital evolution with risky investment and stochastic depreciation.